When you first decide to get a website made for your business or project, there are a few points you should take into consideration before taking the first step. Good planning and having a well outlined goal will massively help you in the long run.
Why do you want/need a website?
Have a good understanding of why you need your website. Write down a list of the reasons and keep this handy during the production stages so you can keep focused and make sure your website is made with the initial purpose in mind. For example, if you have products to sell, your website will be focused around e-commerce and selling, so think about setting up a PayPal or Stripe account for taking payments, or perhaps a merchant account with your bank and also get all your terms and conditions of sale sorted out too, along with the more obvious content, such as good quality product photos, product descriptions, pricing and any other details needed.
If you are a business that provides services, then your primary website goal will be to feature your services in a brochure-style website. Make sure you create good quality content that explains your services well, with your unique selling points displayed on the homepage / about us page for example. You will also need good quality images on your website too, so always best to source these and get all information together before meeting with a website designer.
Information you will need to gather includes:
- Contact information.
- Social media links.
- All imagery/photos.
- Your logo.
- Product information (project images, pricing, description, weight, variants).
- PayPal or Stripe (or merchant account) details.
- Website text content (for about us page / other informational pages).
- Hosting account details (for putting your website online and email addresses for your business – if you don’t have a hosting account we can help)
- Domain Name registered (we can help with this too if required) or login details to your Domain Name provider if you have already registered it.
- Any legal documents, including privacy policy, cookies policy, terms and conditions of sale and delivery information (for e-commerce).
What type of website should you get?
Once you have determined what the purpose of your website is, you can now decide what type of website you want. A great option for most e-commerce stores is to use WooCommerce. WooCommerce makes it easy for users of all abilities to add products and maintain the website, whereas Magento is far more advanced and is best suited to complex e-commerce websites with many products. WordPress is, in our opinion by far the best option for all businesses. It is also very easy to maintain, and is great for Google too (Google loves WordPress and this helps with rankings).
There are many different possibilities for websites and it is important to choose the correct one for your needs. Using the same examples as above, if you want to sell products online then an online shop (e-commerce site) would be best for your requirements. A business offering services would go for a brochure style website.
Talk to your web designer
Good communication is key. When you start working with a web designer to build your site, try to be as clear as possible about what vision you have. Try to describe in as much detail as possible how you want your website to look, and use diagrams and sketches to help with this. Writing a brief before you first meet with your designer is a good idea as this can be left with the designer to read over and come back with any further questions. Being clear in all areas really will help to avoid any delays in completing the project by having to keep going back and forth with your designer to make unnecessary amendments. If you are very vague about what you want, your web designer will do as they see best, which may be completely different to what you had imagined.
Keeping these points in mind should get your web design project off to the best start. If you want to talk to us about your website design project then please contact us today for an informal chat about your project on 020 3637 4885, or you can contact us via our contact form and we will come back to you!